


The Slow and Sudden Shattering

by ThisCat



Category: One Piece
Genre: AU Crossover, Alternate Universe - Demons, Alternate Universe - Fairies, Blood Magic, Gen, mind and memory fuckery, nothing should get too bad, semi-poetic prose, the violence warning is for safety's sake what with the demons
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:48:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28477911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisCat/pseuds/ThisCat
Summary: Between a thousand adjacent worlds, two meet, and the clash threatens to break both.One crew of Straw Hat Pirates, half their number born to and twisted by a sea of demons and darkness, wander into woods deeper than they've ever known, and meet another crew, just like theirs, who followed their fey captain into the Wild and never looked back. Now, they must face each other... and themselves.
Relationships: Mugiwara Kaizoku | Strawhat Pirates & Mugiwara Kaizoku | Strawhat Pirates
Comments: 9
Kudos: 37
Collections: Sake Ceremony 2021





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WhirlyBird70](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhirlyBird70/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Sea of Monsters](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19878067) by [WhirlyBird70](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhirlyBird70/pseuds/WhirlyBird70). 



> Okay. Okay so this is not going to make much sense if you're not on the discord server where I have been yelling about my danged fairy AU for like months, but just know that it is an elaborate AU with worldbuilding that ran away from me where Luffy and a few more characters are fairies, and on the same server is Whirly, who writes the ridiculous and fun East Sea of Monsters, which has every East Blue character as a terrifying demon, and we've talked a few times about wouldn't it be fun to have these respective crews meet? And here is that.
> 
> Happy New Years, Whirly, this is for you.

Three moons shine above, all full, clustered together like the eyes of some unseen beast. Bright white and red and green.

Three moons on a cloudless night, and the woods are as clear as under the sun.

No one sleeps on nights like this, when the world is so starkly visible. Odd shadows shatter on the ground and intersect, and the Veil itself shows like a heat haze in the air.

It flows between the tree trunks like even the ground needs to be hidden when seen in this light, and as the little crew walks through the forest, it wraps lovingly around some of them, coils tightly around one.

Luffy laughs, as loud and bright as the moons above, and waves a hand through the eerie fog just to see it cling to his too-long fingers.

All three moons in the same phase is a worrying omen, and no full moon is ever kind, but Luffy is the scariest thing in these woods. He always is. He’s never feared the sky.

The crew is uneasy, but no more than usual. Luffy laughs and washes it all away.

Luffy laughs, and they follow first, think later.

They bicker and talk, loud and carefree and careless, through a kaleidoscope of light and shadow, and as the fractured moonlight tricks the eye, it’s as if the forest moves around them.

The rushing canopy blocks the sky in all but shards and slivers of light.

Three full moons shine above.

Between one shadow and the next, the air they breathe slides along a plane, and scattered moon-cast shadows shatter and reform.

Four full moons hang above, bright white and red and green, and one in silver blue.

The Veil is like heat haze in the air, more visible than it has ever been, and it flows out and out and out, stretching thin until it nearly evaporates.

Luffy stops laughing for a second just to cock his head and listen.

“Is that music?” he asks, and the crew stops to listen too.

The forest shifts around them, turning and changing as they move, and it sings.

It sings with a thousand voices, flowing in the breeze, mingling with the wind in the leaves and laughing with each other. Joyous wolf howls echo from ahead, and through the shattered moonlight they can see a glow of fire, warm and bright and welcoming, flickering with shadow as from people dancing ‘round a hearth.

Luffy laughs even louder then.

“That looks fun!” he says, and follows the firelight through the moonlit woods, and the crew follow too, unthinkingly.

Because it looks like fun.

It draws them in despite all hesitance. The music is beautiful, and the fire looks warm, and it looks like fun. It looks like _fun_.

The firelight dances. Under the weight of music, the Veil stretches thin.

The sky is shadowed once more, and there is only one moon.

_Do you hear the singing in the woods?_

The music feels like honey-sweet wind, barely there, but sinking through their skin and to their blood. It’s light, and then it’s heavy, clinging to the inside of their minds and beckoning.

It’s harder to think. Harder to remember why they should.

There is only the fire and the song and their feet, carrying them towards it. There’s shapes in the woods of other travellers, other wanderers, others who celebrate, egging them on, waving them forward. _Come join us! Join the party! Dance with us! Sing with us!_

They break through the woods to a clearing ringed by massive trees and topped by an open sky, bright blue moon beaming above, and they _do_.

They dance, forgetting why they shouldn’t.

They sing, they laugh, they let go.

As demons dance in fairy light, the Veil struggles, and snaps.

And _darkness_ streams into the full moon frenzy.

Screams and singing mingle in a single melody, and the air is filled with blood and teeth and loud and raucous laughter, for mindless beasts are not unknown to parties such as these.

And if this one is darker still than even fairies know, well, moonlight madness grips them all regardless.

This is the night when borders blur and magic sings its own. The air itself is melody, the moon is loud and bright and round, and on this night no fear is known to fairy or to fey.

Demons? Hah! This night is theirs. This night is fey, and so are they, their visitors despite.

It’s laughter, wild and bright.

It’s singing, teasing, baiting, binding, bleeding, and they laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

They should be scared, these visitors, as friends and loved ones fall apart to teeth and shade and hunger, but if they are, it’s lost. It’s lost.

It’s lost, along with minds, with sense and names. It’s lost to sound and moonlight.

And demons dance with fairies.

And fairies dance with demons.

And any scar that’s gained tonight will fade before the sunrise. Any door that’s opened should be closed.

Should be….

(The Veil pulses, one last time, clings desperately to this thing that should not be perceived, that would drive them all mad, if not for the full moon’s temporary insanity, and the cracks they slipped through to get here clog up, and do not close.)


	2. Dawn

_Dawn is a symbol of hope in most cultures, the coming of the sun after a long dark night, but there are places it is considered a curse, the unforgiving light again revealing what was once comfortably hidden._

_The only thing certain about dawn, then, is that it is inevitable._

— from a partial copy of An Analysis of Cross-Cultural Symbols, recovered from a lake at the ruins of Ohara, author unknown

— Fairy side, Nami —

Nami doesn’t have a headache, but she feels a little like she _should_ have one.

She always does, after a full moon night. They don’t leave lasting marks, but they do leave memories of them, and she’s never been fond even of the echo of a hangover.

She doesn’t open her eyes just yet.

The wind through her hair and the grass she’s lying on tells her she’s still outside, which is par for the course.

The faint yellow-orange light shining through her eyelids tells her it’s sunrise, and she’s in the Wild.

Also not unexpected. Somehow, they always wake at dawn, afterwards, even though she always remembers faintly having danced through the night. Time can get odd, sometimes, when there’s too much magic in the air.

She can’t feel the movement of the waves, and the wind is muffled by trees, so she knows she’s somewhere out in the Endless Forest. As her mind clicks back into gear, she remembers walking there, too.

It’s always interesting, to spend these nights with fairies other than Luffy.

The first time was with Ace, deep in the desert of Alabasta, and that was overwhelming enough. There’s been others since then. Some strangers, some not. It never matters once the music starts. The last one was with just the crew, not long after they picked up Brook, and Brook may or may not be fey, might know songs humans shouldn’t, but he’s not quite a _fairy_. It’s something else entirely to walk into the Endless Forest to join a party of dozens, maybe hundreds of them.

It’s a very special kind of insanity you gain in a proper full-moon frenzy.

It’s not that it bothers her. She’s long since gotten used to losing her mind, losing her name and self and just _being_ , just dancing, wild and free and no one.

It annoys her sometimes that she can never remember it clearly, that it slips away like a dream, leaving only the echo of aching legs and a throat sore from laughing. And then sometimes she remembers pieces, and thinks maybe she can live just fine not knowing what she gets up to on nights like these. It’s not like it ever has consequences, anyway.

Still, something bugs her this time, so she stays still with her eyes closed and tries to remember before it slips away for good.

There was something different this time. Someone… died?

No, but nearly.

There was blood, and screaming, and terror, and… something.

Something weird with too many teeth in places there shouldn’t be teeth and just… _way_ too many joints. She can’t make it make sense. Probably she’s remembering it wrong.

It might’ve been some Deepwild creature attacking the feast, but she can’t understand why. Even a dragon would have trouble fighting a whole group of fairies on a full moon night, so what would be _stupid_ enough…?

Well, it’ll be gone by now, so she’ll probably never know.

Nami opens her eyes.

She’s met by a dozen melting yellow eyes staring from the shapeless form of a person, wind given mass and a vicious mind.

And she screams.

— Demon side, Usopp —

Usopp opens his eyes and stares into infinity.

Then he closes them and says, “Ow.”

Usopp is used to seeing more than he strictly speaking should. It comes with what he is, with the feathers, with his wayward father’s heritage, but mostly it comes with himself.

He’s used to seeing a lot. Everything, in fact. Past and present, fate and future, thousands and thousands of worlds like layers of paint on a canvas, but it’s usually not as in-your-face as this.

He blinks his eyes open again, squinting against the sky above.

The skies above. A thousand of them, blue and red and every other colour, some colours he knows humans can’t see, some that aren’t colours at all, only pretending very hard to be.

He can see a thousand worlds, but this is only _one_ , and it is all at once, everywhere, endless forest and endless ocean and depths and skies and skies, every single inch of air holds so much space, he can’t keep track of where he is or isn’t, can’t keep track of what’s real.

Except it’s _all_ real, isn’t it? This world (and this is _not_ his world, he knows it) is everything at once, all on top of each other.

It’s enough to give him vertigo.

But Usopp has feathers, if not quite flight-worthy wings. He can hold against the sense of falling. So he pushes himself up until he can stand on unsteady legs and stare.

After a few minutes of blinking and squinting and slowly getting a headache, he thinks he’s getting used to it. At the very least, he’s a little more certain about what is close to him and what isn’t close at all, even though it looks like it’s right on top of him.

There’s a tree, somewhere beside him, and he _thinks_ it’s close enough to be real.

It probably is. It’s as translucent and blurry as everything else he can see, but it’s _big_. It’s tall, of course, and massive just in size, trunk thick enough that two of him wouldn’t be able to reach around, but there’s more than that. There’s more of it than just the one, though they’re all the same, reaching through and stretching out in a _different_ direction. It doesn’t make sense.

At least the ground under his feet feels solid, even as he’s only half sure which of the grounds he sees is the one he’s actually standing on.

He takes careful steps forwards until he can reach out and touch the tree, and he can feel it, too, can feel bark under his fingertips, feel the tingling presence of life.

It makes him pause, then hesitantly lean forwards until he can press an ear against the bark.

Usopp’s eyes are better than most, but his other senses are no better than those of the average demon, so if even he can sense this presence so clearly, this tree must be something powerful indeed.

It’s aware and alive. It’s ancient, and even larger than he first assumed.

It knows he’s there. The _forest_ knows he’s there. The whole massive place is alive and awake, and it can sense him, just as he’s sensing it.

It makes a shiver run down his spine. Makes all his feathers stand on edge.

Nothing good ever comes of places knowing you.

But the trees don’t react, even as he stands there frozen. They’re aware, but, he thinks, theirs is a different kind of awareness. Older, larger, slower.

They’re just trees.

He takes a deep breath and tries to calm down. He’s been worse places than this, has been through worse shit than this, and if the trees don’t even want to harm him, he’s going to be grateful.

With the tree trunk under his palm to anchor him, it’s getting easier to see what around him is in the same place as him and what is somewhere… deeper, somewhere a step to the left, somewhere almost here but not quite.

He’s in a clearing, he thinks, right at the edge of it. It’s large, and the grass on the ground is slowly recovering from having been stomped flat. A black spot somewhere in the middle is slowly fading.

A sun is rising in the east, and he can’t see enough from here.

Whispering a quick request for permission and word of thanks, he starts climbing the tree.

He misses some branches on the way up, misjudging which layer of existence they’re on, but by the time he reaches a proper height, he has a good grip on it.

He might not truly be a bird, but he _is_ a sniper. He always feels better with a good vantage point.

He was right about the clearing, and the spot of soot in the middle of it might have been a campfire. He remembers fire, vaguely, from the night before. Remembers something warm and bright and alluring, but anything after that is lost to the wind, like sand between his fingers.

Either way, the tracks may be nearly gone, but for him, it’s still easy to see the traces of hundreds of people.

Now there’s just their crew, scattered on the grass. Franky is face down on the ground, snoring, with Chopper sleeping on his back. Brook is slowly getting up one bony limb at a time. Nami is already up, sorting herself out and looking curiously down at… well, Usopp can only think about one thing at a time right now, so he pushes that out of his mind for later. Sanji is asleep, Robin is awake, Zoro is plain gone (the idiot) and Luffy….

Luffy is tied up and suspended ten meters above the ground by seven ropes tied to massive trees. He’s stirring, struggling, but the ropes don’t budge. And he looks different.

Usopp has always seen more than he should, and he learned long ago not to look too hard at Luffy. There are things people are not meant to see, whether they’re demons or not. The heart of nightmares. The blood of dead and dreaming gods.

Usopp doesn’t look, normally. It’s easy to let his eyes slide over the Veil layered so thick around his captain it makes him almost invisible.

It’s not as easy now. They grey haze of the Veil is thinning.

Luffy hurts to look at. Even the people with duller eyes than Usopp have to be seeing it. The oppressive darkness that leaks through from within is impossible to ignore.

There’s more, too. Being a demon, the Veil has never tried to trick his eyes, but he’s always been aware of it. Usopp can see _everything_ , after all. It’s always been there, wrapped around him. Even back home, it loomed at the horizon like an insurmountable barrier. Passing through it nearly blinded him for a second, when they left the East.

Now, he can’t see it at all.

Aside from the fading sheet of it still clinging to Luffy, there’s no trace of it anywhere. Not around them, not at the horizon, not at _any_ horizon.

They’re so far away from home.

And then… then there’s the other crew.

— Fairy side, Robin —

Something has gone wrong, this time around.

Robin takes the situation in calmly, pushing her immediate reaction aside. Primal terror is never productive.

She meets the eyes of the other her across the clearing and recognizes a similar thought process.

The other Robin is nearly identical to herself. The same eyes shadowed by the same bangs. The same reserved way of holding herself. Her clothes are different, but it’s most likely simply a case of having picked out different ones the previous morning, and not in any way indicative of a differing personality.

It’s almost amusing, how similar they are, considering how wildly different some of the others seem to be.

The other Franky seems far more at home in himself, still snoring loudly on the ground, while their own hasn’t been entirely present in his body since he built the Sunny. The other Chopper is sleeping as well, and it’s hard to say from here, but he seems less marked by the Wild than animals should be.

The other Brook is standing up and looking around, and he seems more blind to the world around him than their own is.

And then there’s four creatures.

They’re four of the original five who once sailed with the princess, Robin thinks, but it’s hard to believe her beloved crewmembers and these entities could possibly share anything of their existence.

Robin’s crew is her family, her home, her _captain_ , to whom she swore her heart and soul. She trusts them to her core.

These things reach into her and drag out every scrap of fear they can find, just by their presence.

But she looks at the one covered in soft, black feathers who’s currently scaling a tree, and it’s a monster, but the way it moves reminds her of Usopp.

And she looks at the skeletal shape trailing smoke and sparking fire, and it carries Sanji’s face.

And she looks at the one with no real shape but the wind itself, a child of the skies with molten yellow eyes to meet hers, and who can it be but Nami?

And Luffy….

Somehow she recognizes Luffy, even though the creature strung up above them looks nothing like him at all.

The strange and twisted Luffy struggles against his bonds, but it’s futile, of course. Robin doesn’t know half as much about fairy magic as she’d like, but she knows enough to tell that this binding will not break, not for anything. Seven tethers, bound to old and deep trees, the knots tied on a full moon night. They can be undone, but not bested.

Robin is glad for it.

It feels strange, to fear any version of Luffy. She handed him her heart and soul willingly, feels safer no place than at his back, but this creature bound above their heads scares her, and her own captain isn’t here.

The other Luffy is hard to look at, seems blurred out, as if some fog lies between her and him, but he’s visible enough she sees teeth and claws and misshapen limbs and horns that curl above his head like a crown. There’s blood on his face, blood on the grass below him, blood soaking into the ropes binding him, and he’s struggling like a sullen child.

Robin looks away and finds the other version of herself looking up as well.

This is new to the other Robin too. Not unexpected, but new.

Something has gone wrong this night. Many things have gone wrong, she suspects, and she has no idea where or how.

People are stirring all over the clearing, reacting with fear and confusion. It’s a slow process after a long night for everyone to drag themselves out of sleep.

Her own Nami finally blinks awake to look around, and then she screams loud enough to wake everyone who’s still drowsing.

— Demon side, Nami —

Nami steps back from the screaming girl and tries to ignore the implications of… of that hair, of that tattoo, of everything.

That’s what she looks like under the Veil, at least as far as Robin describes it, and Nami isn’t _stupid_.

They never should’ve entered this forest. Now she has no idea how to get back, and everything is wrong. The trees are watching her, the wind is lying to her, and the Veil is gone.

She’s not happy to be missing it.

It used to bother her, when they first entered the Grand Line. She liked it better back home, when it only covered visitors’ eyes and left her and everyone to run around and be exactly who and what they are.

But she’s gotten used to it. She’s used to it now, and missing it completely seems so wrong.

She isn’t meant to be seen, like this. The storm winds comprising her body are meant to be hidden away from human eyes, for good reasons. She feels almost naked, now, and it hurts when Franky wakes up and scrambles back with a gasp of fear, when Chopper clings to his arms, shaking, looking at them all with wide, scared eyes.

There are things they haven’t told all the members of their crew, and it was never meant to matter, but now it does.

No, this won’t do at all.

She growls, and then forcefully stills the cyclone growing in her gut. “Is everyone awake now?” she asks, loudly. Most everyone jumps. She ignores it. “Okay good. Come on. Let’s figure out where the hell we are, how we get Luffy down from there and how the hell we get home.”

Luffy perks up at the mention of his name. (Perks down? He’s hanging upside down.) He’s been struggling against the ropes since he woke up and hasn’t put a scratch on them, and that worries her.

Robin walks over and puts a hand on Franky’s arm, and hopefully she will be able to explain.

Nami is counting heads, and she comes out missing one. Or three. It amounts to the same. “Where’s Zoro?”

“Yohohoho,” Brook laughs, and he’s shaking like a leaf, and then he stops. He’s long since gotten used to living with terrors, even if these specific ones are new to him. “He disappeared almost as soon as he woke up. It was like he faded into nothing! It scared me to death! Ah, but I’m already dead.”

Nami ignores his manic cackling to curse loudly. Zoro’s lost already. That’s gonna be a problem.

“Usopp?” she says, looking to the one crewmember they can usually rely on in a Zoro situation.

Usopp is currently climbing slowly down from a tall tree, far more carefully than he normally would. He reaches the bottom and tries to jump down the last meter, only to land wrong and crumple to the ground in a heap of limbs and feathers.

“Usopp! Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he says as Sanji helps him to his feet, but he’s blinking heavily, grimacing like he has a headache, and he clings to Sanji like the ground under his feet isn’t stable. “Just can’t see what I’m fucking standing on.”

“So, you won’t be able to find Zoro,” she says.

He squints at her and then grimaces. “Sorry. Shit. This place is fucked up, and not the normal kind of fucked up. Are those guys… us?”

She reluctantly follows his gaze to see the other crew standing close together at the other side of the clearing. The girl with the orange hair isn’t screaming anymore, is peeking out from behind a man who looks far too much like Sanji to be a coincidence, and…

Nami isn’t stupid, and she’s not a coward.

“Yes,” she says. “I think so. Don’t ask me how. I suppose this place, this island? Is just like that.”

“Island? Nami, we’re in a whole other parallel universe.”

Sanji almost drops him to the ground. “We’re _what_?”

“A parallel… How do we get back from _that_?”

“I don’t know! This isn’t like one of those not-spaces Zoro falls into sometimes either, this is _really far away_ , and it’s fucking me up.”

“Shit,” says Nami.

A parallel universe. As terrifying as that is, at least it explains those strange other versions of themselves.

Now that she understands why, it’s a little less creepy, and she’s able to take a proper look at them. It’s strange, to see a version of herself that is entirely _human_ , but at least she’s exactly as stunning as she deserves to be.

Looking back at her own crew, her heart twists. They’ve split down the middle, almost automatically, the demons standing huddled together here closest to Luffy, and the humans standing farther away.

It’s fine. It’s going to be fine, she tries to remind herself. Robin already knew, and she’s talking to Franky and Chopper in a low voice, and the two of them at least suspected, even if they didn’t know the truth. Brook is acting as scared of them now as he was of the ghosts back on Thriller Bark, which means far more than he actually is.

It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine. It has to be.

But it’s been less than two months since Water 7, since the crew nearly broke, and Nami isn’t ashamed to say she’s worried.

“So we’re all more lost than Zoro gets, except Zoro has somehow gone and gotten himself even more lost than that.”

“Yeah that’s about… right,” says Usopp. “I have no idea how we’re gonna find him. I’m scared of getting lost myself if I move too quickly.”

“I’m sure the moss ball will be fine,” says Sanji. “Are you gonna fall if I let go of you?”

Usopp thinks about that for a second before he slowly lets go. “No, it’s fine, I’m starting to get used to it, I just don’t get _why the hell_ … Actually.” He raises his voice and shouts across the clearing. “Hey! Why the hell’s your world four-dimensional?”

— Fairy side, Chopper —

“It’s _what_?” the thing of wind and clouds that smells vaguely like Nami hisses.

Her voice sounds like air whistling through a crack in a window, melodic and inhuman, but Chopper’s ears are good enough to pick the words up from across the clearing.

“Yeah, it’s all on top of itself. Never seen anything like it,” says the creature with the feathers that speaks in Usopp’s voice.

They don’t know what the Wild is, and Chopper thinks that might scare him more than what they are.

They look almost like something from the Deepwild, where the very laws that hold the world together break apart, but if they don’t even know what the _Wild_ is, maybe this is just what their whole world is like?

A whole world like the Deepwild. Chopper shudders to think of it. Even before his devil fruit, even new-born on shaking legs, he knew not to venture too deep into the Wild.

It’s instinct, for most animals. You go too deep, you die, or worse.

But no, some of their other members seem entirely human, and humans can’t live in the Deepwild, so it must be something else.

Zoro has one of his swords an inch out of its sheath, ready for a fight if it comes to it, but not quite about to start one.

Chopper climbs up his back to sit on his shoulders and cling to his head, just to feel a little safer. Then he shouts to answer the strange and twisted other version of Usopp. “It’s just the Wild!”

Their own, human, friendly Usopp says, “Chopper! Don’t talk to them! What’re you doing?”

“But… they’re lost, aren’t they? And we usually help people who are lost.”

You always help when help is needed. That’s what Doctorine taught him, and Chopper may not be a fairy, but he was taught by one. No matter how much you hate someone, no matter how much you fear them, take your payment, yes, but if they need help you _help_ them. That’s what it means to be a doctor.

“I’m not sure if these guys are actually people,” says Usopp. “I say we just stay away until we leave.”

“Agreed!” says Nami, one hand in the air. “I vote we wait until Luffy comes back and then get the hell out of dodge immediately.”

“I agree with Namiii~,” says Sanji.

“Feels weird to just abandon other versions of ourselves, though,” Franky says.

Robin chuckles in that way she does when there’s really nothing funny happening. “It’s the captain’s decision either way, isn’t it? They don’t seem aggressive to me, or what do you think, Zoro?”

Zoro still has his hand on his sword, and he’s looking not at the group of creatures on the other side of the clearing, but up, at the beast tied above them.

It looks like Luffy. It doesn’t look like Luffy at all. It’s a predator, and Chopper knows that to the marrow of his bones. It’s blurred, muted, hidden by something he can’t see, and more than anything else here, it feels so deeply wrong.

Zoro grunts and clicks his sword back in its sheath. “Maybe. I don’t like this.”

“Ah, excuse me,” says Robin.

Except it’s not Robin, it’s the other Robin, walking closer with a smile that is probably a lie, like Robin does. The other less scary members of the other crew come closer as well, at her back, and the… things… come a few steps closer too.

“Would you mind elaborating? What is the Wild?” asks the other Robin.

Chopper looks at Nami, looks at Robin, really wishes Luffy was here. “Umm,” he says. “I don’t really know how to explain it? It’s like left or right. I don’t even know what it means if you don’t have it. Your whole world is cityscape?”

“I suspect so,” says Robin. Their _own_ Robin, and this is going to get confusing. “The Wild is, as your friend said, what exists in the fourth dimension of this world. The deeper you go, the stranger it gets. Humans normally only live on the top layer. As deep as we are now is, ah, I suppose you could call it fairyland.”

“Fairyland?” says the other Franky. He looks a lot like their own, but he smells less like wood and more like metal. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“You’ve never met a fairy, have you?” says Robin.

The wispy clouds and wind in the vague shape of Nami says like a mild breeze, “If they’re anything like ours, I don’t like this.”

The other Franky looks almost as scared of his own crewmates as Chopper is, and that’s just wrong.

“Hey!” says the thing that might be Luffy from above, and _everyone_ flinches, human and creature and other. “Get me down from here!”

The ropes hold.

Those ropes would hold a dragon, Chopper knows. They won’t break for anything.

But the thing that is not Luffy smells like blood and danger and death, and the ropes don’t feel like enough.

“Ah, I dunno how,” says the thing with feathers, squinting up at the ropes like the sun is hurting his eyes. “I don’t think there’s even proper knots, and if _you_ can’t budge them, I don’t think there’s much we can do.”

“Could knock down the shitty trees,” says the thing that smells like hot coals and smoke and wears Sanji’s face.

“No!” says several people. Chopper nearly jumps off Zoro’s shoulders, Franky takes a step forward and holds his hands out, their own Sanji nearly drops his cigarette and even the strange feather-Usopp gets in on it.

The thing wearing Sanji’s face stops, open-mouthed. “O…kay. I won’t touch the trees.”

“I don’t believe it would work either way,” says Robin, looking up at the thing hanging above with analytical eyes. “A binding like that sung on a full-moon night is all but unbreakable, and none of us are fairies. I don’t know how to undo it.”

“Eh? But that sucks!” says the thing that is not Luffy.

“So the full moon’s how they got here, right?” says Franky, scratching his neck.

Everyone turns to him.

“I mean, ‘s the only thing that makes sense, isn’t it? People always say full moons make the borders between worlds thinner and such.”

Feather-Usopp gives a full-body shudder, which makes him look a little like a very creepy baby bird puffing up. “Dammit. I _said_ we shouldn’t have gone out tonight. I _said_ something terrible was gonna happen. I _told_ you.”

“Shush,” says the wind-Nami, sounding unamused as the clouds she’s made of darken.

“But that’s ridiculous!” says their own Nami. “Full-moon nights don’t have consequences! That’s the point. Everything goes weird as hell for a night, and when you wake up it’s all back to normal. That’s how it always is, right?”

She looks to Robin for reassurance, and Robin doesn’t give it.

“It’s not unheard of,” she says instead. “It’s rare, but it does happen every now and then, that rules like those break.” She looks up at the creature above again, a hint of worry in her expression. “I suspect this time, something came through that was strange enough to bend the very rules by which our world runs.”

It’s not hard to believe.

“Shit,” the thing wearing Sanji’s face swears. “Shit shit shit. Do we just wait for the next full moon, or do we have to wait until it synchs up between worlds again?”

“That could take… roughly a century!” shriek-hisses the wind-Nami, lightning sparking among her clouds.

“Then what the hell do we _do_?” says feather-Usopp.

And then Luffy steps into the clearing, dragging something horrible behind him.

Everyone steps back to let him walk up between them.

Luffy doesn’t look worried. He’s grinning, on the edge of laughter like he always is at the promise of adventure, like all of this is great fun. His steps are easy and confident and his monkey’s tail swishes happily behind him.

In his hand he drags something almost like Zoro along by the wrist.

The creature has scales, glinting metallic in the morning light, has burning eyes and sharp-sharp teeth, and there is _more_ of him than there should be.

Chopper isn’t fey, not truly, but he is an animal, and he belongs at least partially to the Wild. He can see the shadow of more limbs, more _heads_ , sense a supressed but very present bloodlust seeping through from below, and only Deepwild creatures should ever exist on more than one layer, but this creature does.

And yet he follows Luffy without question or complaint, with a quiet sense of belonging here, at Luffy’s back, even when this Luffy isn’t _his_ Luffy, and it’s so much Zoro it’s hard to believe he’s not Zoro.

They stop right between the two crews, and Luffy turns around and starts rifling through his pockets. “Don’t move.”

The other Zoro takes the smallest step back, and immediately starts… fading, like the ground can’t hold him, like he’s dragged down to the lower layers of the Wild by the weight of those limbs on his back.

Luffy grabs his wrist with his tail and yanks him back. “I said don’t move!” he snaps.

And Luffy’s fangs may not be as sharp as those of this strange other Zoro, but they’re still the teeth of a fairy, of a predator, and they’re impressive enough to stall any argument.

The other Zoro stays still, and Luffy pulls string and bits of metal out of his pockets and ties them as bracelets around the other Zoro’s wrists. First the left, then the right, and then he reaches out for the other four, hidden away but still entirely real.

He’s humming as he works. Just a simple melody, to lend the metal weight. _Anchors_ , Chopper thinks. Or at least pieces of one.

“There,” Luffy says. “Now you won’t fall through.”

“Huh,” says the other Zoro, studying the braided string around his wrist. He takes another small step, and this time, he doesn’t fade. “Thanks.”

“Holy shit does that actually _work_?” says the feather-Usopp. “ _Thank you_. Can we like, keep those?”

“Course. It’s a gift. You look really cool with feathers, Usopp.”

Luffy reaches out as if to grab a bunch of feather-Usopp’s feathers, and feather-Usopp looks at him and flinches back, stumbling over his own feet and crashing right into the other Franky’s chest.

The other Franky yelps in surprise and falls over, launching the other Chopper, who he was still holding in his arms, into the air, where he’s caught by the other Zoro.

Luffy laughs.

“Uh, Luffy?” says Usopp. “That’s… That’s not me.”

“Eh? But it is, though?” says Luffy, like it’s obvious.

Then he walks up to stand directly under the creature that is not himself, looking up with curious eyes.

“You look funny.”

“ _You_ look funny,” says the creature. “You’re not a demon at all.”

“Nope,” Luffy laughs. “I’m a fairy. Are you gonna eat any more people if I let you down from there?”

Demons. Of course they’re _demons_.

“Nah, I’m good,” says the demon that is not Luffy. Then he tilts his head and frowns, and somehow it still reads as consternation even though every part of the movement is wrong. “Sorry about the biting people thing.”

“Don’t worry about it. It wasn’t anyone I knew,” says Luffy.

“Oh, that’s okay then.”

But it’s not. It’s really, really not.

And Luffy laughs, and leaps through the grass on all fours, bounding for a tree. He scrambles up the trunk like the monkey he resembles and then walks casually along the rope strung from it until he’s standing practically on top of the demon.

“Luffy, _no_ ,” says Nami, but it’s too late.

Luffy whistles something, loud and sharp, and crouches down to touch the rope. Sparks go off like tiny fireworks, and then they both drop.

The demon falls in a heap of limbs and joints that are all wrong, and Luffy lands nimbly on his feet.

Chopper holds his breath for a moment, holding maybe too hard on to Zoro’s head, but Zoro has his hand on his sword too.

The demon stands up and grins with far too many teeth, and for a moment Chopper is convinced they’re all going to die there, right that moment. There’s nothing they can do to stop it.

But the moment passes, and the demon, as he said, does not eat anyone.

“ _Why_?” Nami demands.

“Cause they’re us!” Luffy says. “We gotta help them!”

“We really very much do not.”

“Nami,” he says, and it’s heavy.

He might not even do it on purpose, but that word is a command. It tugs at that part deep in all of them that they swore away to him once, the reminder that they’re _his_.

It’s just a reminder, but it’s enough.

Nami sighs and says, “Yes, Captain. How’re we doing that?”

“The new moon. We gotta get right under it. Can you do that?” He grins, like he hasn’t just asked the impossible.

“Are you _kidding_? You want me to navigate, on two week’s warning nonetheless, to a specific _random_ point on the globe that I have to _calculate_ , while we’re _on the Grand Line_ , and you want me to do it while we have a ship full of _demons_?!”

“So you can do it, right?”

“Of course I can! I just don’t _want_ to!”

“Wait, so it’s the _new_ moon now?” asks the thing with Sanji’s face. “I thought it was the full moon that opened the doors or… however that works.”

“Nah,” says Luffy, like it’s obvious. “Full moon wants weird stuff, the new moon fixes stuff. If you’re still here afterwards you might break or something, though.”

Chopper doesn’t know if that’s true, but if Luffy says it, it probably is.

He takes a deep breath.

They’re demons. They’re monsters. They’re predators. They’re terrifying.

They’re people, and they need help.

The Captain decided. There will be no argument.

Luffy grins, and leads them out of the Endless Forest.


End file.
